Step 9: Request a refund

You can issue full or partial refunds against previously successful Capture operations by calling the Refund operation. The capture process generates an AmazonCaptureId that must be included in the call to the Refund operation.

Note: There is no time limit for initiating a refund, but the longer you take to request a refund, the more likely that a payment method associated with the purchase will become invalid and the refund will fail.

The Refund object

In Amazon Pay and Login with Amazon, a Refund object represents the movement of previously captured funds to the buyer's account from your account. At any time, the Refund object can be in one of the following three states:

Pending - Amazon Pay does not process your refunds in real time. The Refund object is always in the Pending state when you first submit the refund request. You will receive a synchronous response to the Refund operation that indicates this status. The Refund object remains in the Pending state until it is processed by Amazon. The processing time varies and can be several hours. After processing is complete, Amazon Pay notifies you of the processing status. For more information on how to receive the final refund status, see "Getting the refund status" below.

Declined - The Refund object is in the Declined state if the request is declined by Amazon Pay. For more information, see Declined refunds.

Completed - The Refund object is in the Completed state after the refund is successfully processed.

Declined refunds

If the Refund operation call is declined, you see one of the following two reason codes included in the response:

AmazonRejected

Amazon has rejected the refund. You should issue a refund to the buyer in an alternate manner (for example, a gift card or store credit).

ProcessingFailure

ProcessingFailure indicates one of the following:

Amazon could not process the transaction because of an internal error.

The buyer has already received a refund from an A-to-z Guarantee claim or from a chargeback.

If you receive a ProcessingFailure reason code in the response, you should first check the A-to-z Guarantee claim and chargeback status for your order in Seller Central by clicking Performance. If no A-to-z claim or chargeback has been issued to the buyer and if the Capture object is still in the Completed state, retry your request in one to two minutes. If the retry attempt does not succeed, contact the buyer and issue the refund in an alternative way.

For more information about the Refund operation, including the request parameters and response elements, see Refund in the Amazon Pay API reference guide.

Getting the refund status

The response to the Refund operation includes a response element called the RefundStatus, which is always set to Pending. You will later receive the final status of the refund request (for example, Completed or Declined) from Amazon Pay through the Instant Payment Notification service. For more information about the Instant Payment Notification service, see Synchronizing your systems with Amazon Pay.

You then have the option to query details of the Refund object by calling the GetRefundDetails operation using the AmazonRefundId that was returned with the Refund response. For more information, see GetRefundDetails.

Notifying buyers of successful refunds

Every time a successful refund takes place, Amazon Pay sends the buyer a Refund notification email with details about the refund.

Amazon Pay lets you specify various pieces of information in the emails sent by Amazon Pay, like your customer service email address, phone number, or the note from the seller. For more information about customizing these emails, see Buyer-facing email content that you can provide.